Will there be a settlement between the NFL and Jonathan Vilma in the suspended New Orleans Saints linebacker’s defamation lawsuit over Bountygate?

Maybe.

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An offer from the NFL to Vilma was reported Monday morning by ESPN. In exchange for dropping his suit against commissioner Roger Goodell, the league would cut Vilma's season-long suspension in half, to eight games.

A Friday federal court date looms, serving as a “soft” deadline for ongoing settlement talks, ESPN and other outlets are reporting, and the Vilma offer was made sometime last week.

Not true, insisted the NFL hours after the original report surfaced. “Completely inaccurate. No such settlement offer has been made,’’ according to an NFL spokesman.

Good move by the NFL there. Not the reported settlement, but the denial. In fact, it would be smart for both the league and Vilma to back away from this as fast as they can, whether it was ever officially offered or not.

No matter what might be gained from that deal by either side, a lot more stands to be lost. Too much, in both cases.

Once Vilma filed his suit back in May, this stopped being about the bounty program itself, or about the severity of the punishment. It became about the character, honesty and integrity of both Vilma and Goodell. Vilma challenged all of that in Goodell, and demanded that he prove them all in court, after Goodell brought all of these in Vilma into public doubt by disciplining him as hard as possible.

Now, neither the player nor the commissioner can afford to concede any ground on this. In this reported settlement proposal, both give up ground — and both would look much the worse for it. Oh, it’s easy and fun to choose sides in this battle, and plenty of people have: Either Vilma is 100 percent right and Goodell 100 percent wrong, or vice versa.

But, if the NFL bargains its way out of the lawsuit, it tells the world that it was going to be vulnerable in court once the case got there. It would leave an everlasting impression that the evidence it has against Vilma — and, by extension, everybody else punished in the Saints’ organization — wasn’t as airtight as it has been portrayed since the very beginning.

Plus, it would imply that there were nefarious reasons why it stonewalled the players and the union on releasing everything it had on Vilma and Co., and why it kept trying to sell the public that it actually didn’t have to show everything, and if the union didn’t like it, too bad.

Finally, this suit obviously can open the door to all of the NFL’s disciplinary patterns — and to the bane of the players’ existence, Goodell’s judge/jury/executioner role.

As convenient and timely as it would be for the NFL to wash its hands of this unexpected detour in the bounty case, its hands would stay dirty for a long time after this. The notion, embedded in the minds of the players over the last few years that Goodell’s imperial commissionership has gone too far, would be solidified even further.

All of which would make Vilma a big winner, with a notch on his belt, half of his season and salary saved and his reputation restored. Right?

Not quite.

Accepting that offer then raises this question: Was this really about defaming Vilma’s character, about due process, about a Goodell power trip that needed to be reined in for the good of the unfairly-maligned players and the game of pro football itself?

Or was this about Vilma not having to miss a year out of his career, a year of his earnings and a possible future contract?

And that question is eclipsed by a bigger one: So, if you accept eight games, even though it’s less than 16, that means you’re way guiltier in this bounty scheme than you had been claiming all along, doesn’t it? Or much less purely innocent.

According to a report Monday by Peter King of Sports Illustrated, that issue is a reason why this remains a proposal instead of a settlement. King reports that the NFL is looking for precisely that, for Vilma to admit culpability, “but that he’s steadfast against that — as are the other three players who've been suspended.” Those would be former Saints Scott Fujita and Anthony Hargrove and current Saint Will Smith.

There’s nothing in this for Vilma except a return to the field — which is a wholly understandable motivation at this point in his career, and which he’d have to decide is better for him than to be branded a liar, or at best a man in denial.

The NFL gets the same thing out of it. They will be the league that doesn’t spend the season tied up in court, but also one that buckled when threatened with legitimate justice, and one that conducts shaky, one-sided investigations that don’t stand up in the light of day.

The goal in this entire affair, for either side, should be the truth. For what it’s worth, this proposed settlement could get everybody there.